Rebecca Sanborn Stone's Blog

On the last weekend in January, a small crowd of onlookers gathers at the edge of Brookfield Pond in central Vermont for what is – these days – a most unusual spectacle. An odd contraption of wooden beams and iron hardware stands on a patch of ice surrounded by rusted old saws and oversized tongs. A local historian narrates as two men move to the center of the ice and begin sawing. After a few minutes they use a strange fork to pry loose a block more than a foot thick. An ingenious lever system easily lifts this 300-pound block of ice off the water and lands it safely on the surface, frozen before it hits the ground.

Welcome to the Brookfield Ice Harvest. It’s one of the last of its kind - an event that’s essentially a relic, carried out by small northern towns to celebrate history and liven up the long, frozen winter.

Until WWII, harvesting ice was a necessary part of life. Before refrigerators, this was the only way that families and general stores could keep food products cold in the warmer months. The mammoth blocks of ice were stored between layers of sawdust until they melted, at which point people were out of luck until the next winter.

My husband, daughter and I watched the spectacle last weekend until our toes numbed. As we headed back toward the car my husband shook his head. “Sure seems like a lot of work when you can just open up the fridge.”

That’s for sure. But there are also consequences to opening up the fridge – and a thousand other modern conveniences – that we don’t think about. We’re so used to having things exactly when, where and how we want them that we rarely give thought to whether we could do without, or perhaps even do better without. I’m not about to ditch my appliances and head for the river with a saw and pitchfork, but the ice harvest did get me thinking about how we could embrace more of that old time ethic in our home lives and our communities, and why we should.

My Yankee ancestors have been touting a phrase for generations: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” I was excited to run across a new blog built on that concept, by blogger and writer Meg Hourihan. She’s challenged herself to buy nothing in 2012 except for what she’s used up or worn out. A great mantra and one that seems relatively easy to adopt until you’re faced with saying no to your niece’s request to buy girl scout cookies, or passing up that 90% off sale at your favorite store. But if we could all move in that direction, there’s no question our wallets, our closets, and especially the planet would be better for it.

If you’re intrigued but not quite ready to go whole hog, there are plenty of ways to start down this path. Closest Closet – one of last year’s CommunityMatters Strong Communities Competition applicants – is a unique project in Southern Maine that aims to help neighbors recycle and share, turning to each other rather than buying new. If you don’t happen to live in Southern Maine, check out the Freecycling Network – a similar concept, nationwide.

Communities often seem to do better than consumers at embracing this ethic, albeit by necessity. We’ve yet to hear about a town in the U.S. that isn’t facing budget shortfalls and cutbacks, and most places are pretty creative at making do and doing without when it comes to rec funds and school supplies. But the Minnesota non-profit Strong Towns has helped communities reexamine their decisions concerning land use and infrastructure improvements. Strong Towns’ “Curbside Chat” program and a companion booklet helps communities see why some “growth” and “progress” is actually setting us back.

Just as we want ice in July, we want bigger, smoother, nicer roads. We want new developments with views of the countryside. We want more growth, period. The problem is, the things that communities and consumers believe will make them stronger and wealthier often don’t.

I’m not a Luddite, and the message here isn’t that growth and conveniences are bad. But there are tradeoffs and there are alternatives – ones that people don’t often think about in today’s world. It is possible to harvest ice from a pond rather than pulling it out of the freezer. It’s possible to borrow that thingamajig from your neighbor’s garage rather than buying it online. It is possible to build our communities differently.

And it’s quite possible that using up, wearing out, and making do in some aspects of our lives and communities will prevent the very real possibility that we’ll have to do without in others.

You may remember the children’s story...

Two soldiers walk into town empty-handed and in desperate need of a good dinner. The stingy villagers won’t invite them in to dine, but when the soldiers start cooking up a batch of Stone Soup, the villagers get curious and toss in a carrot here, a potato there, just to see what happens. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

In no time at all, the whole village settles in to enjoy a feast—and a community—cooked up seemingly out of nothing.

It’s no secret that the majority of Americans has lost faith in the government (never mind those who never had faith to begin with). But our elected officials rarely address this issue head on; they usually dodge the question and offer platitudes or bullet points about their own personal agendas.

The honest response from American government, according to The Onion, would be, “right back atcha.” The Onion issued a hilarious report last spring that explains why: “Majority of Government Doesn’t Trust Citizens Either.”

Here’s $90. Do something good with it by the middle of January. Go!

That’s the challenge that all of us here at the Foundation have taken on this holiday season. Holiday giving is a tradition, but we’re putting a little twist on it this year. We typically each toss in some money for a charitable donation this time of year, the Foundation generously matches our gifts, and we choose one cause in New England and one in the Rocky Mountains that each get half.

This year we’re mixing it up with a little experiment in microphilanthropy, and I wanted to take this opportunity to get some help with my own task and issue a challenge.

Photo: cityofmanor’s photostream on Flickr

I am a proud resident of a small town. I live in Bethel, Vermont, with approximately 1900 other people and about as many cows, four restaurants, two markets, one school and no stop lights. Most of my neighbors get their news in the local paper and share their views at the dump on Saturday mornings.

Still, Bethel is actually pretty progressive, as far as rural, small town technology goes. We don’t have a Twitter feed or a Facebook page, but the Town does have a basic website, kept up to date with phone numbers for the town offices and PDF files of Select Board minutes.

Still, I can’t help feeling a little tech envy when I read about places that are exploring high-tech ways to open up government, provide people with access to all sorts of municipal data and resources, and make it easier than ever for elected officials to involve and communicate with their citizens:

• NeighborworksAmerica reported on seven new ways that social media is improving neighborhoods: from neighborsforneighbors.org, a Boston non-profit that created social networks for every neighborhood in the City, to thisweknow.org, which makes it easy to compare data between cities.
   
• New York City just concluded its Big Apps competition, making reams of municipal data available to citizens and inviting them to create applications using it. The winners make it easier for New Yorkers to find a subway entrance, rate taxis and learn about their schools.
   
• Cities from New Haven to San Francisco are jumping aboard SeeClickFix or using 311 lines and iPhone apps (like this one in DC), enabling citizens to quickly report issues like potholes and crime hotspots, and enabling governments to quickly take action.

In Millbridge, Maine, a local non-profit won federal funding to build housing for immigrant laborers. But local residents circled a petition and approved a moratorium on multifamily housing in order to keep immigrants out.

In Brooklyn, New York this fall, a local Hasidic community objected to safety issues and immodest clothing among cyclists on its neighborhood bike lanes. The Department of Transportation sandblasted the lanes—which guerrilla bicycle activists promptly painted back on.

And in Katy, Texas, when a local Muslim community purchased a piece of land and planned to build a mosque and school, one citizen responded by running pig races next door on Friday evenings, the holiest day of the week for Muslims (see Jon Stewart’s coverage on The Daily Show, below).

One of my favorite things about the holidays is having time for things that I never have time to do otherwise—fold the laundry, call old friends, catch up on the back issues of magazines stacking up in the hall. So as the snow tumbled down and piled up here in Vermont, I settled in with the March, 2007 National Geographic: elephants, cosmic explosions, sharks in the Bahamas, and sunny, lush, alluring, enchanting Orlando.

I was reading some old back issues of National Geographic recently and came across articles about some bizarre yet interesting places—Ski Dubai, an enormous indoor ski area, a beach in Paris that the City constructs along the Seine each year, and Disney’s beloved and reviled playground, Orlando. The stories of these places reminded me of Lyman Orton’s disgust upon hearing of a proposal to build a wildlife park on the side of a mountain in Weston, Vermont, which the local Planning Commission discovered was, in fact, permitted under the zoning bylaws at that time and which the Commission was powerless to prevent.